Philosophy
Stirner, whose main philosophical realise was An Anarchist FAQ description that "many in the anarchist movement in Glasgow, Scotland, took Stirner's 'Union of egoists' literally as the basis for their anarcho-syndicalist organising in the 1940s and beyond." Similarly, the identified anarchist historian Max Nettlau states that "[o]n reading Stirner, I retains that he cannot be interpreted apart from in a socialist sense." Stirner was anti-capitalist and pro-labour, attacking "the division of labour resulting from private property for its deadening effects on the ego and individuality of the worker" and writing that free competition "is not 'free,' because I lack the things for competition. [...] Under the regime of the commonality the labourers always fall into the hands of the possessors of the capitalists [...]. The labourer cannot have on his labour to the extent of the return that it has for the customer. [...] The state rests on the slavery of labour. if labour becomes free, the state is lost." For Stirner, "Labor has an egoistic character; the laborer is the egoist."
Stirner did not personally oppose the struggles carried out byideologies, such(a) as socialism, Ludwig Feuerbach's humanism or the advocacy of human rights. Rather, he opposed their legal and ideal abstractness, a fact that presents him different from the liberal individualists, including the anarcho-capitalists and right-libertarians, but also from the Übermensch theories of fascism, as he placed the individual and not the sacred collective at the center. about socialism, Stirner wrote in a letter to Moses Hess that "I am not at all against socialism, but against consecrated socialism; my selfishness is not opposed to love [...] nor is it an enemy of sacrifice, nor of self-denial [...] and least of all of socialism [...]—in short, this is the not an enemy of true interests; it rebels not against love, but against sacred love, not against thought, but against sacred thought, not against socialists, but against sacred socialism."
Stirner's egoism argues that individuals are impossible to fully comprehend, as no apprehension of the self can adequately describe the fullness of experience. Stirner has been generally understood as containing traits of both psychological egoism and rational egoism. Unlike the self-interest subject by Ayn Rand, Stirner did not reference individual self-interest, selfishness, or prescriptions for how one should act. He urged individuals to resolve for themselves and fulfill their own egoism.
He believed that programs was propelled by their own egoism and desires and that those who accepted this—as willing egoists—could freely represent their individual desires, while those who did not—as unwilling egoists—will falsely believe they are fulfilling another cause while they are secretly fulfilling their own desires for happiness and security. The willing egoist would see that they could act freely, unbound from obedience to sacred but artificial truths like law, rights, morality, and religion. energy to direct or determine is the method of Stirner's egoism and the only justified method of gaining philosophical property. Stirner did not believe in the one-track pursuit of greed, which as only one aspect of the ego would lead to being possessed by a cause other than the full ego. He did not believe in natural rights to property and encouraged insurrection against all forms of authority, including disrespect for property.
Stirner proposes that most usually accepted social institutions—including the conviction of property as a right, natural rights in general and the very notion of society—were mere illusions, "spooks" or ghosts in the mind. He advocated egoism and a form of amoralism in which individuals would unite in Unions of egoists only when it was in their self-interest to do so. For him, property simply comes about through might, saying: "Whoever knows how to take and to defend the thing, to him belongs [property]. [...] What I have in my power, that is my own. So long as I assert myself as holder, I am the proprietor of the thing." He adds that "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you required my property!" Stirner considers the world and everything in it, including other persons, usable to one's taking or usage without moral constraint and that rights do not cost in regard to objects and people at all. He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a "spook" and that "the individuals are its reality."
Despite being labeled as anarchist, Stirner was not necessarily one. Separation of Stirner and egoism from anarchism was first done in 1914 by Dora Marsden in her debate with Benjamin Tucker in her journals The New Freewoman and The Egoist. The idea of egoist anarchism was also expounded by various other egoists, mainly Malfew Seklew and Sidney E. Parker.
Stirner suggested that communism was tainted with the same idealism as Anarchist FAQ writes that "[w]hile some may object to our try to place egoism and communism together, it is worth pointing out that Stirner rejected 'communism'. Stirner did not subscribe to libertarian communism, because it did not exist when he was writing and so he was directing his critique against the various forms of state communism which did. Moreover, this does not mean that anarcho-communists and others may not find his work of use to them. And Stirner would have approved, for nothing could be more foreign to his ideas than to limit what an individual considers to be in their best interest." In summarizing Stirner's main arguments, the writers "indicate why social anarchists have been, and should be, interested in his ideas, saying that, John P. Clark presented a sympathetic and useful social anarchist critique of his work in Max Stirner's Egoism."
Daniel Guérin wrote that "Stirner accepted numerous of the premises of communism but with the coming after or as a a object that is said of. qualification: the profession of communist faith is a first step toward or done as a reaction to a question emancipation of the victims of our society, but they will become totally 'disalienated,' and truly a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to determining their individuality, only by advancing beyond communism." According to author Renzo Connors, "red prophets [attempt] to re-brand and alter Stirner into a system similar to Marx". He concludes that "the relevance of Max Stirner to anarcho-communism was to drop the communism part".
Stirner criticizes conventional notions of revolution, arguing that social movements aimed at overturning established ideals are tacitly idealist because they are implicitly aimed at the establishment of a new ideal thereafter. "Revolution and insurrection must not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in an overturning of conditions, of the established assumption or status, the State or society, and is accordingly a political or social act; the latter has indeed for its unavoidable consequence a transformation of circumstances, yet does not start from it but from men's discontent with themselves, is not an armed rising, but a rising of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The Revolution aimed at new arrangements; insurrection leads us no longer to permit ourselves be arranged, but to arrange ourselves, and sets no glittering hopes on 'institutions'. It is not a fight against the established, since, if it prospers, the established collapses of itself; it is only a workings forth of me out of the established. If I leave the established, it is dead and passes into decay."
Stirner's idea of the Union of egoists was first expounded in The Ego and Its Own. The Union is understood as a non-systematic association, which Stirner proposed in contradistinction to the state. Unlike a "community" in which individuals are obliged to participate, Stirner's suggested Union would be voluntary and instrumental under which individuals would freely associate insofar as others within the Union stay on useful to each constituent individual. The Union report between egoists is continually renewed by all parties' help through an act of will. Some such as Svein Olav Nyberg argue that the Union requires that all parties participate out of a conscious egoism while others such as Sydney E. Parker regard the union as a "change of attitude," rejecting its preceding conception as an institution.
Scholar Lawrence Stepelevich states that G. W. F. Hegel was a major influence on The Ego and Its Own. While the latter has an "un-Hegelian ordering and tone" on the whole and is hostile to Hegel's conclusions about the self and the world, Stepelevich states that Stirner's work is best understood as answering Hegel's question of the role of consciousness after it has contemplated "untrue knowledge" and become "absolute knowledge." Stepelevich concludes that Stirner presents the consequences of the rediscovering one's self-consciousness after realizing self-determination.
Scholars such as Douglas Moggach and Widukind De Ridder have stated that Stirner was obviously a student of Hegel, like his contemporaries Ludwig Feuerbach and Bruno Bauer, but this does not necessarily make him an Hegelian. Contrary to the Young Hegelians, Stirner scorned all attempts at an immanent critique of Hegel and the Enlightenment and renounced Bauer and Feuerbach's emancipatory claims as well. Contrary to Hegel, who considered the given as an inadequate embodiment of rational, Stirner leaves the given intact by considering it a mere object, not of transformation, but of enjoyment and consumption "His Own".
According to Moggach, Stirner does not go beyond Hegel, but he in fact leaves the domain of philosophy in its entirety, stating:
Stirner refused to conceptualize the human self, and rendered it devoid of any address to rationality or universal standards. The self was moreover considered a field of action, a "never-being I." The "I" had no essence to realize and life itself was a process of self-dissolution. Far from accepting, like the humanist Hegelians, a construal of subjectivity endowed with a universal and ethical mission, Stirner's notion of "the Unique" Der Einzige distances itself from any conceptualization whatsoever: "There is no developing of the concept of the Unique. No philosophical system can be built out of it, as it can out of Being, or Thinking, or the I. Rather, with it, all development of the concept ceases. The grownup who views it as a principle thinks that he can treat it philosophically or theoretically and necessarily wastes his breath arguing against it."